


in a cat's eyes

by Tale of Winter (Odyle)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe, Cat, Crack, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-20
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 00:58:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/387901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odyle/pseuds/Tale%20of%20Winter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s something off about the only stray cat in Storybrooke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an unabashed cracky cat AU. This was written as a series of short snippets intended for Tumblr.

Word got around quickly that there was a stray roaming Storybrooke.

Emma couldn’t go a day without getting a call about the cat. Each time she had to go out and investigate. She had chased the cat down side streets and through well manicured backyards, but she had yet to catch it. Her attempts to refer the residents to animal control led to the realization that Storybrooke had no animal control department. So Emma resigned herself to chasing the cat again and again. 

It never appeared in the same place. However, everyone knew it was the same cat. People talked about it in the checkout line at the grocery and in the cafes. Two weeks in the _Daily Mirror_ , not wanting to miss a chance to take pot shots at Emma, tacked a special section called “Cat Watch” on to the crime blotter. There wasn’t much crime happening in Storybrooke and the whole crime blotter was typically taken up by the cat’s exploits.

Emma wasn’t quite sure what all of the hubbub about the cat was for. It was, to her reckoning, just a cat. A brown tabby with bright golden eyes and dainty paws. It was by no means a big or even aggressive cat. The cat had never tried to bite or scratch her, even when she’d gotten quite close to it. It was strange behavior for a cat. Emma hadn’t been around many in her life, but even she knew it wasn’t typical behavior. There was just something not quite right about the cat. 

“What are you going to do with it if you catch it?” Mary Margaret asked her. 

“No, clue,” Emma said. “Maybe leave it on the mayor’s doorstep?” 

“That’s just cruel.” 

“To her or the cat?” 

Emma came to a point where she didn’t even chase the cat anymore. When she got a call of a sighting, she’d hop into her car and drive out. Sometimes she would have to disperse the onlookers, sometimes she would be alone already. Emma would out out a little bit of cat food, then sit down and wait for the cat. Some days it appeared, some days it didn’t.

 

The days it did appear, the cat would rush out from beneath a bush or around the side of a house to the food dish once it ascertained that Emma was the only one there. The tabby would shove its face into the pile of food and eat, barely stopping to chew. 

“You know, if you’d just let me catch you, you could be someone’s cat and they could feed you until you were round,” Emma told the cat. 

The cat paid her no attention. Only when it had eaten its fill would it notice her. As they established a routine, the cat grew friendlier, coming closer to Emma until it allowed her to stroke its tail a few times before it fled. 

Each time she was closer and closer to catching the cat. The thought of finally catching the cat gave her a sense of dread. She had no clue what to do with it once she had it. It wasn't as if there was a pound. Emma entertained the thought of letting it live in the jail. 

And then, one day, the cat was gone.

\---

He found her where she’d hidden in the garden. He didn’t bother to keep the garden up anymore. It was just a tangle of weeds and the remnants of once well tended hedges and rose bushes. She was gone and there was no reason to labor away at keeping it up. 

Letting someone else touch the rose bushes was out of the question, not because of money but because of their connection to her, to him, to what had been. Paying someone else to keep them up seemed impersonal. Letting them languish reminded him of his sins and of why he was miserable. He couldn’t show her love, just as he couldn’t nurture the rosebushes back to health.

He found the tabby crouching beneath one of the bushes. She was still, her tail curled up close to her body and her golden eyes alert. She watched him, as if she belonged there and he was the intruder.

There was no collar on it, but the cat appeared to have been well-fed by someone.

He tried shooing the cat away, shaking the bush, clapping his hands, but nothing seemed to work. Mr. Gold poked at it gently with his cane, but the cat only slipped around the other side of the rose bush and laid down again.

“I expect you to be gone before I return,” he told the cat. “Or I’ll call someone not nearly so nice as the sheriff.”

The cat was not impressed. It flicked its tail back and forth, watching him still.

\---

This was the place. She had been looking for it quite some time, roaming the streets of this town looking for this place. It was not the place she remembered.  
That had been much bigger. She had memories of getting lost in great rooms full of old books and trinkets where the sunlight hardly ever shined. Rooms where he’d had to come and find her and lead her back to safer spaces. 

This place was not the same, but it was the same. 

There were the rose bushes she’d always enjoyed. They weren’t in bloom, but she enjoyed listening to the wind rustle through the leaves and napping beneath their shade. These were not things she had enjoyed before, but she saw their virtue now. 

The thing that defined the place, however, was not the rose bushes, but his presence. 

But even he was different here. 

There were no more sudden appearances. She had been keeping a close eye on him, watching all of his movements to and from his home. Sometimes she would sit on the windowsill outside the kitchen and watch him as he moved about. He smelled just the same as he had in the other place. It made her want to rub her head against his legs, all three of them. But something had happened in the other place which kept her from doing so. 

He didn’t remember her or, at least, he didn’t recognize her. He watched her, though she watched him more. The man was suspicious of her. 

Life in the garden was easy. She napped in the sun and beneath the bushes, her surveillance of him taking up only a small fraction of the day. The other hours were spent lazing and eating what she could find. 

One day, he was coming down the back steps, walking on all three legs. One of his feet missed the last step and he took a tumble. He’d been going too fast, not paying attention to what he’d been doing. She darted out from behind the tree where she’d been hiding to check on him. 

At first, he didn’t move. His face was screwed up in an emotion she vaguely recalled as pain. She pressed a paw to his forehead and he opened his eyes. The cat rubbed her head against him, trying to will him to sit up. Humans weren’t supposed to lay like that. She knew when he reached up to stroke a hand along her spine that she knew he’d be fine. She purred for him, loud so she knew he could hear it. When he sat up again, she climbed into his lap and proceeded to make biscuits.

He spoke to her in hushed tones, and she understood none of it.


	2. Chapter 2

The cat took to following him. It would be waiting by the door when he left for the pawn shop in the mornings, and would follow him all the way to the pawn shop door. When he left in the late afternoon, it would still be waiting there for him.

Mr. Gold did nothing to encourage this behavior. He gave the cat no food and refused to pet it or stand still so it could rub itself against his trouser legs, leaving a smattering of light and dark brown hair over the fabric. This lack of affection did not dissuade the cat.

Cat Watch updated for he first time in weeks with the news that the cat had been spotted following one Mr. Gold to and from work. It would have been embarrassing, had he cared about the good opinion of anyone still living in the town.

“Is it your cat?” the sheriff asked. She’d stopped by a part of her investigation of the cat, or so she said. There was brown cat hair all along one sleeve where she'd apparently stopped to pet the cat. 

“Miss Swan, do I seem the type of man to keep a cat?”

In truth, he was learning to like the cat. The cat was a good companion. It demanded his attention only occasionally, said nothing, and kept up with him. He’d let it inside during a rainstorm the week before and fed it tuna from a pouch that he’d intended for his own dinner. After their meal, the cat climbed into Gold’s lap and fell asleep there. When he’d gotten up to go to bed himself, the cat had grudgingly let him go and fallen asleep again in the warm spot in the chair where he’d been sitting.

“If you tell me that isn’t your cat, I’m going to have to take it in.”

“And what are you going to do with the cat, Miss Swan?”

“I don’t know. Probably let Mary Margaret overfeed it.”

“The cat seems to think its mine, so it might as well be,” he said, turning to focus on some other task. “You can safely put ‘Cat Watch’ behind you.”

  


\---

  


There were as few options as he'd expected. The only pet store in Storybrooke carried only four brands of cat food. That was only one brand more than the grocery. He selected the most expensive and put it in his basket. Price was no guarantee of quality, but he knew nothing about cat food.

Mr. Gold had collected one laser pointer shaped like a mouse, a package of fake mice that rattled, a wand with a bright collection of feathers at the end of a string, a pop-up tunnel, and a cat collar. The shop girl, who clearly recognized him, had been studiously avoiding his presence. It was better that way, to be ignored rather than judged while comparing different brushes. 

He was looking at cat carriers when he spied Dr. Hopper and his mutt coming toward him. 

"Good afternoon, Mr. Gold," the doctor said, tugging Pongo, who was attempting to stick his face in Mr. Gold's basket, back. 

Mr. Gold lifted his basket higher. Pongo sat back on his haunches, still staring at the basket. 

"Good afternoon, doctor."

"I hear you've adopted a cat," he said, motioning to the basket. "It's a very healthy thing to do. I think you'll find--" 

"Thank you for your advice, Dr. Hopper, but if wanted your professional opinion, I would have paid for it." 

He left them there and went to check out. It was uncharacteristic of him to be so impatient with the doctor, but he was tired of people taking an interest in his business. They were supposed to fear him, not chat him up, and the cat was certainly proving to be a gateway to conversation. Years and years had taught him how to demand that rent be paid, but had dulled his skills of conversation in the grocery store checkout line. 

He kept the cat inside, but it only made people talk more. Out of sight, of mind was simply wishful thinking. They would stop him and ask where the cat was, if she was doing well. Mr. Gold assured them that the cat was well, but he could tell they thought he was lying.

  


\---

  


Inside was better, particularly when the weather was cold or it started to storm. She could curl up in one of the chairs inside or wander through the mountains of things he kept in the house and not emerge for hours. There was always a new nook or cranny to discover, somewhere new to hide or to mark.

The man fed her well. He'd tried for a few days to encourage her to eat dry bits that she had to chew thoroughly. When, after a few days, she refused to eat them, he was distressed. Of course, the man tried not to show it, though it was only the two of them. Eventually they came to an understanding of dry food mixed with wet. 

Aside from such small skirmishes, they lived in companionable silence. She would watch over him, catching the few mice who'd dared to take up residence in his house, and grooming him when he seemed to neglect it. In turn, he would feed her and let her sleep in his lap after he returned to the house. Late at night, when he'd been asleep for hours and she'd finished her last survey of the house for the evening, she'd sneak into his room and curl up beside him in bed. 

He smelled just the same as he had before. It comforted her and helped her sleep easy.

  


\---

  
Sheriff Swan was in the middle of untying him when she paused to ask, "so how is the cat?"

Mr. Gold had been minding his business, tinkering with a watch when two men in masks had marched into his shop and knocked him out. They'd tied his hands behind his back with a rope, gagged him, then stashed him in the back room. 

The question had caught him off guard. They had, at this point, developed a predictable pattern of conversation when these sorts of things happened. Sheriff Swan would ask him questions, trying to sound indignant, though not quite able to pick her words so it didn't sound as if she thought he deserved it. 

"Fine," he said. "Yesterday she broke a teacup." 

"Broke a teacup?" 

"She knocked it off of the kitchen counter and chipped it," Mr. Gold said rubbing his wrists. 

"I guess you run that risk if you've got a cat." 

He couldn't say why he'd divulged this detail to the sheriff. She was not among his allies, nor was he particularly fond of her. 

He described the robbers to her, though there wasn't much to describe. It took him some time to determine what they'd taken. A packet of beans was missing from its place near a small collection of garden implements. The sheriff had been skeptical and asked him to look again, but that was the only thing missing. He gave her the name of the thieves and recommend that she track them down quickly. It wouldn't do to be soft on crime. Aside, if she didn't recover them quickly, they'd sprout. 

Emma sighed and jotted down the details, assuring him that she'd bring the bean thieves to justice. 

"Did you ever name the cat?" she asked him. 

"Not yet," Mr. Gold replied. 

The detail had actually slipped his mind. He hadn't needed any particular name for the cat. It responded well to "cat" or "you," and he hadn't really seen the need to name it anything further. 

"Well, you should probably get on that," the sheriff said, taking one last look around the scene before she departed.


End file.
